Brugmansia or Angel's Trumpets the genus that relies on humans

Alistair Hay was once a research scientist and director of The Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney. He has co-written a book on the genus Brugmansia, also known as the Angel's Trumpets. As Alistair Hay explains, there is no known pollinator of the 7 species and numerous cultivated varieties, leading to speculation that the seeds were once dispersed by a now extinct species of mega fauna.

Transcript

Robyn Williams: Another mystery about trumpet shaped flowers is just as surprising as the daffodil’s trumpet structure in its flower. Angels' trumpets. Where did they come from in the wild? Alistair Hay has just published a superb book on these species. But he doesn't like the name I just mentioned.

Alistair Hay: I call them Brugmansias because I do like the name angels' trumpets particularly, it sounds rather Christian to me and these parts are not very Christian at all.

Robyn Williams: Even from South America?

Alistair Hay: Indeed, they are very deranging for most people who ingest them, and I wouldn't describe that as a very angelic experience. But more importantly the indigenous people on whom the entire genus depends for its existence use these things in animistic rituals and so on, which have got absolutely nothing to do with Christianity at all, or didn't originally, some of them now do in fact conflate Christianity with animistic practices. But to me it's an inappropriately religious sounding name.

Robyn Williams: Well, apart from the fact that angels can be non-Christian as well perhaps, do any of the species come from, say, Europe or elsewhere other than South America?

Alistair Hay: No, they are all from the Andes, except one from eastern Brazil, but they are all South American.

Robyn Williams: And now there are something like 160 species, are there?

Alistair Hay: No, there's only a few, only about seven.

Robyn Williams: Only seven?

Alistair Hay: Yes, but many, many cultivated varieties.

Robyn Williams: I see, that's how you get the numbers. How were they first discovered? Presumably the indigenous people knew them very well, but where was the European connection first of all?

Alistair Hay: The first known connection was when the Spanish arrived in South America, and they were cultivating them by the end of the 16th century as ornamental plants. They sent them back to Europe, but they didn't successfully get introduced into Europe until the end of the 18th century.

Robyn Williams: And there are plenty in Australia, they grow all over the place and they look wonderfully elegant, hanging down, often white trumpets.

Alistair Hay: Yes, they are just completely outrageous, and there's no real understanding of why they have such enormous flowers, up to half a metre long in one species.

Robyn Williams: Did you say half a metre?

Alistair Hay: Yes.

Robyn Williams: You'd have to be a pretty big fly to get up there! Doesn't that put off pollination, climbing all that way?

Alistair Hay: I don't know. I suspect they are pollinated by hawk moths with very long proboscis.

Robyn Williams: Half a metre long proboscis!

Alistair Hay: Well, they can get halfway into the flower and then the remaining 25 centimetres is the nectary.

Robyn Williams: Well, going back to that question of hallucination. Could you bring in the name Aldus Huxley into this legend?

Alistair Hay: Huxley wrote a couple of essays in the 1950s in which he suggested this very interesting idea that we are interested in all sorts of things which are very spectacular to look at, things which are very beautiful and very colourful and so on, because of visions emerging from the subconscious, which can be induced by taking psychoactive plants among a variety of ways, which have incredible brilliance. The idea of the divine originated from people taking psychoactive plants.

Robyn Williams: Which he did as well, he took lots of psychoactive things, and wrote about how the doors of perception can be altered by such practices. Where there many traditional uses of this plant for such things in South America?

Alistair Hay: Yes, there are two types of uses. There are straight medicinal uses, of which there are many. They are very, very important antirheumatic plants, for the same reason as they are hallucinogenic; the tropane alkaloids they contain have medicinal properties as well as hallucinogenic. I suspect that they were used for both purposes ever since people arrived in South America, possibly about 15,000 years ago.

The interesting thing about these plants is that you never find them wild anywhere, and I don't think there's a genus of plants that I know of like it, where the entire genius is cultivated. You don't find seedlings. You find fruit everywhere full of fertile seeds but they are not dispersed. And so plants are entirely cultivated. And the suggestion we came up with to explain this is that they were actually adapted to being dispersed by extinct mega-fauna, gomphotheres and giant ground sloths and so on. That's not really provable until somebody finds some dung with Brugmansia seeds in it, which has not yet occurred. But it's difficult to find any other explanation, because the fruits just mummify on the plants and nothing disperses them, which would suggest then that since the mega-fauna became extinct 10,000, 12,000 years ago, that the plants have become adopted by humans and hence the genus has persisted since the extinction of its dispersers.

Robyn Williams: Could it not be that somewhere in the Andean rainforest there might be still a flourishing plant?

Alistair Hay: Well, there might. I suppose it is possible. But somebody like Richard Schultes, who was the great Harvard ethnobotanist and who spent 30 years doing fieldwork in South America and was particularly interested in these sort of plants, never found a single seedling.

Robyn Williams: Amazing. Now, going back to the psycho-effects. They grow all over Australia. What if we were to nip a couple of flowers and chew the end bit, what would happen?

Alistair Hay: Well, it would be a very extremely silly thing to do and very unpleasant. The effects are quite dramatic. They are very quick, and if the dose is large enough they are very violent, and may then, following a violent phase lasting for about three days of incredibly uncomfortable torpor and visions, they stop you salivating, they may stop you peeing, they may stop you sweating. So it is a really unpleasant experience, and people do take it, of course a very stupid thing to do, and then say, well, we will never, ever do that again.

Robyn Williams: Is that what you said?

Alistair Hay: I haven't taken these, it's much too dangerous. Even the shamans who are adept at using it, they wouldn't let somebody like me do it.

Robyn Williams: So there is a careful ritual that they still do in South America.

Alistair Hay: Yes, but most of the people who actually use Brugmansias will have been well, well versed in the use of other less dangerous psychoactive plants first, and they tend to use Brugmansias as a last resort, and people who are really desperately ill will be given it, and very, very difficult cases of witchcraft that the shamans are treating, they might use Brugmansia for that.

Robyn Williams: Well, you've written a wonderful book about it with superb illustrations and some terrific stories, but you have worked on the plants yourself, have you not?

Alistair Hay: Yes indeed, yes, I've done quite a lot of fieldwork in South America with them. One of the things I wanted to confirm was in fact these things don't occur in the wild.

Robyn Williams: So where did that take you?

Alistair Hay: Down to the Amazon and Ecuador. One of the things that was difficult to write about in the book was the use of them as hallucinogens with no experience of taking hallucinogenic or vision inducing plant medicines with a shaman. So I decided that the chapter was impossible to write without doing that, so I went down to the Amazon and did quite a number of ceremonies using ayahuasca, which is a cocktail of plants in the Malpighiaceae, Banisteriopsis and Diplopterys, which are much easier to tolerate than Brugmansia.

Robyn Williams: But you've had nothing to do with breeding some of the strains.

Alistair Hay: Some of the cultivars? Yes, I've been doing that, but that's kind of for fun.

Robyn Williams: Ah. Is it easy?

Alistair Hay: Yes, quite easy, you can get them to flower in about a year from seed, quite a rapid process, even though they are quite big trees.

Robyn Williams: You now have a garden on the South Coast, having had the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney at your disposal. Was it true you were in charge of some of the plantings thereof at the Botanic Gardens in Sydney?

Alistair Hay: Yes indeed. Most of the time I was at the Botanic Gardens I was a research scientist, but then I ended up being director of the Botanic Gardens, and so I was overseeing Mt Tomah, Mt Annan and the Royal Botanic Gardens for a while, which was a great privilege.

Robyn Williams: Now your garden is on the south coast of New South Wales.

Alistair Hay: Yes, and I now have another one in Columbia.

Robyn Williams: Oh, what happens there?

Alistair Hay: Well, I've just bought a 31-acre plantation, old coffee plantation, which we are turning into a botanic garden to be used in particular for cultivating plants which are sacred to the indigenous people, and as a place to enable indigenous people who have knowledge to teach indigenous people who have lost it but want it, about the traditional uses of sacred plants.

Robyn Williams: Well, I wish you the very best of luck with the book, thank you.

Alistair Hay: Thank you very much Robyn.

Robyn Williams:Huanduj:Brugmansia is the name of Alistair Hay's book. He's formally from the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney.

Credits

Comments (4)

Autumn Mandrake :

27 Oct 2012 1:07:48pm

I think that the introductory text above meant to say "disperser" rather than "pollinator".

Brugmansias are quite easily pollinated by a wide range of co-evolved and non-co-evolved pollinators, and the specimens flowering in my own garden attest. The problem is that they are not dispersed (consumed, passed through digestion, and defaecated) by any known living animal.

recher :

24 Nov 2012 4:56:37pm

Angel Trumpet is a great common name for both Datura and Brugmansia. Both have the same potentially death delivering chemistry: hyopscamine and scopolamine.

Both dried and smoked one or two tokes are first class bronchial dilators for asthma attack. In fact before the current inhalants Dr. Asmador cigars were de rigeur for asthma. In fact, this herb should still be used for asthma. The dose required to cure an attack is way below any threat to consciousness and intoxication.